Finding Facebook Friends

I am reviewing this blog and realizing that I have talked about how important Twitter is becoming and how useful blogging is. I have seldom mentioned facebook. I wonder if the reason I do is because of how long I have been on facebook. I have had a profile on facebook for years. Since before I decided on my major. I have been so excited about discovering the other social media programs that I have neglected my old standby. This post is going to give facebook some much needed attention.

Pr-Squared has a few hints the shed some light on how to engage facebook in public relations:

1. Hook up with facebook PR communities. Groups such as the official facebook public relations group, and social media measurement.
2. Identify appropriate target groups.
3. Identify the activity of the groups.
4. Identify the group type. Are they open? Closed? What is the general 'vibe?'
5. Befriend the Admins. Make friends from the top down. Once the Admins are comfortable with you and your product they can use their pull to influence the entire group.

In my own community of friends and acquaintances, facebook is second only to the telephone. I remember what life was without it. It is invaluable to me socially and using it as a PR tool seems only natural.

There's more than one way...

Shift Communications holds a section of their blog pr-squared as an academy. They call it their, "Jedi Training Academy." I am an avid star wars fan. Sign me up!

Reading through some of the stories in their I was impressed by the way they get through. They were trying to get some exposure for their client and were getting ignored by the blog they needed the exposure with. They never gave up, they persisted until they realized the blog was never going to recognize their client. They put their heads together to find a way around that. How do you get a blogger to recognize a product on their own blog that they have no intention of recognizing?!

Their answer was ingenious. They contacted another client who had experience with the product they were marketing, and asked them to mention it in the response section of the target blog. The client did so and soon, Shift communications was contacted by a writer for FORTUNE small business magazine! He saw the response on the blog and was curious about the product.

Wouldn't you know it, a later customer of that specific product was on the cover of FORTUNE small business! Working outside the box but without breaking any ethical or legal boundaries Shift Communications got their job done.

I guess there truly is more than one way to..mmm, guess I better leave it right there. You fill in the rest!

The Mommy-Blogger's Market

I have read a case study of how Shift Communications cracked into the mommy-bloggers, a niche that has been saturated by spammers and pop-up windows for years. The review is up on Todd Defren's Blog Pr-Squared. His account of it is entitled, "Blogger relations case study: mommybloggers."

Shift Communications was working with a client who created handheld scanners, presumably for use by business travellers. The idea was that the travellers could scan their receipts 'on the go' and create their own expense report while they were on the road. This would require minimal effort.

As fate would have it, Martha Stewart found about the device and sales skyrocketed. The business wanted to crack into the mommy-bloggers. Mommy-bloggers is a term used for the countless blogs that have to do only with being a mom, raising children, etc..

Shift Communications decided to take a different approach from the usual mommy-blogger marketing campaigns. They looked through the blogs and found, as Todd Defren explained it, "a niche within a niche." They found a few blogs that ended up being mommy-bloggers who were also technogeeks. Shift Communications then reached out to only three. They respectfully approached them and told them of the scanner. All three bought and used the scanner for scanning kid's pictures, etc.

Then Shift approached the moms again and offerred them 10 more scanners to give away in a contest. The way people would become eligible in the contest would be to write a review of the product either on these technogeek mommy-blogger's blogs, or on their own and link the review to the other blogs.

The result was a windfall. 1,200 reviews of the scanner, providing the makers of the scanner vital insight as to what the needs of these mommybloggers were. They not only broke into the niche...they broke into the niche in the niche.

And that is why I want to get into this business!

PR Jiu-Jitsu

Todd Defren's blog, Pr-squared has an interesting idea on it that I find a wonderful strategy to know. His post is entitled, How PR can perform Jiu-Jitsu on Sales Team Demands.

He acknowledges the frustration of having the sales teams of companies lean on the PR departments to release information so they can use it to close deals. This 'derails' the PR plan and the PR department loses credibility. His idea is ingenious:

First, he writes, look at the long term and refuse to derail the PR plan. In the long run, the sales team will be more sucessful by sticking to the plan. Second, give them a draft of the upcoming press release with DO NOT DISCLOSE stamped on it. When they show that to their prospective sales, they will build themselves up by showing that they are in the loop, as well as building up the prospect by allowing them in the loop as well. Everyone likes to know secrets. Everyone likes the advantage and anticipation of 1-upping the rest of us.

Not a bad idea Mr. Defren. If they want too much information, unnoficially put them on the inside track.

My Experiment

I have been awakened with a swift kick to the back-end to the importance of marketing yourself, doing your own public relations as practice for the real thing in your career. Most of the advice that I have read online to PR students is to write, write, write.

So I decided this week to do just that. I have started a blog entitled www.fatherhoodsquared.blogspot.com to start pounding the pavement, so to speak. I will start to excercise the lessons learned in the text as well as in this blogging assignment to start marketing myself and my influence. We will see what happens, but I must admit it is very liberating to start writing about something dear to your heart. I am publishing a blog about my family stories.

Honestly my family should be a sitcom. We have family dynamics that provide so much material to share with the world. Six kids, five of which are girls and one lonely boy who hangs out with his dad as much as possible. The material is there. Now to market it.

My plan follows what I have blogged about before. Start the umbrella opened far and wide. Let the most amount of people see it. I have been sending links to my friends, family, and facebook/twitter contacts. I am three days into it, with three short posts. I will enjoy it.

Once I have a good starting number I will focus on tighter public. I will investigate other blogs that are similar to my own and link to them. I will respond to their posts and encourage them to visit my blog. Facebook is receiving my updates as well as twitter. I am excited. I feel good about it.

This is going to be an experiment. I will be using principles used in this class to chart their effectiveness and hone my own skills. When the time comes, I understand there will be more serious blogs to write and I will be skilled enough to promote them.

Mr. Olson's Mantra

So now we live in the brave new world of online social networking. You can work with anyone in the world, develop a working relationship with them and never shake their hand. It reminds me of something my 7th grade shop teacher told us in class. "Most of you," he said, "will work in careers that haven't even been invented yet." He would repeat this mantra a few more times during the one semester I braved shop class.

I understand that public relations has been around in some form or other since mankind were dwelling in caves, but who can deny the fact that public relations as a profession, heck, as an art form, only vaguely resembles a shadow of itself 20 years ago when I went to Milwaukie Jr. High School!

Indeed I am learning how to influence publics on a grander scale and faster than I could have imagined in 7th grade. For crying out loud, email didn't become popular until I was 20 years old. I am preparing myself for a career that, for all intensive purposes, didn't exist in 1987.

So, Mr. Olson, thank you for your foresight. We live in a world where technology moves so fast that we are racing to keep up with it.

The Power of Social Media, a reflection

I find it interesting now that I am learning about blogging and tweeting that I knew so little about it before. In today's day and age there is so much information that comes seemingly effortlessly through Twitter in particularly that I am almost embarrassed not to see it until my Junior year of College.

Now that I have however, I am finding it becoming essential to the PR perspective. Instant access to clients, co-workers, fans (if you have 'em!), family, businesses, or what not is priceless when your profession is to understand how to motivate the public perception of something or someone.

I would imagine that holding a following on twitter or facebook would almost be used for currency in the job interview process. I mean, interviewing someone with hundreds of 'friends' or 'followers' looks to be a measure of someone's effectiveness at public relations. I mean, if they can swing the public to promote themselves, how effective could they be if they used their power and influence to help you!

Corporate Brand Ambassadors

Jeff Wilson discussed a term I have never heard before in his post 5 Tips to Turn Employees into Corporate Brand Ambassadors. I love it! The Corporate Brand Ambassador! The superhero of the lowly Public Relations Specialist!

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but in reality I love it. It's the difference between a SubWay employee and a 'sandwich artist.' The title implies more. It implies a career, not a job. It implies investment. I am sold on it and I have only read one article on it!

Mr. Wilson gives five steps to train a PR guy/gal into a Corporate Brand Ambassador. The five steps are listed below:

1. It Starts With Leadership. You can't push a chain, a fish rots from the head first. Oppositely, motivation comes from within but is focused usually by the leadership from without. A sold leader leads to sold subordinates. A leader who believes in his/her product holds an influence that can't be faked.
2. Communicate the brand promise at every opportunity. One piece of motivation is to be involved in something larger than yourself.
3. Celebrate and reward standout brand ambassadors. People, like electricity, tend to move to the areas of least resistance and more reward. It works in elementary school, it works with my children, it works at work. Rewards bring results. Rewarding one motivates others.
4. Embrace employees' use of social media to promote the brand. I am learning that technology is so much to Public Relations. The more you use social media, the better your rewards would be in this day and age. Embrace it or die!
5. Evaluate progress. As a matter of course, evaluation is essential to everything.

4G-izzle!

Last month, B.J. Novak (actor, writer, producer, comedian) came to Utah State University to do a stand up gig. "Snoop-dog is a genius," he told the crowd. "How ingenious to invent -'izzl!' How brilliant to add '-izzl' to the end of every word when your entire job is to make words rhyme!"

CNNMoney.com has published an eye opening report on how the cell phone industry is doing that as well. Instead of changing part of the word however, they have just added on. It's called "4G." We have all heard about it. It's the next big thing. What CNNMoney.com is finding though is that 4G is a title, not a speed.

"4G is a myth. Like the unicorn, it hasn't been spotted anywhere in the wild just yet--and won't be anytime in the near future," CNNMoney.com writes. It maintains the standard 4G requirement is that data be transferred with the phone at 100 Mbps speed.

No one is anywhere close to that.

Verizon could be as fast as 50 mbps, but currently runs at 12 Mbps; it's the fastest of the three major carriers! T-Mobile has the capacity to run at 21 Mbps, but runs 12 Mbps. Sprint could run 20, but runs 10.

Now before all the air is let out of the speed balloon, let's review why the carriers and holding on to the 4G title if they can't back it up. It looks to be old-fashioned competition.

"It's very misleading to make a decision about what's 4G based on speed alone," said a spokeswoman for Sprint Nextel to CNNMoney.com. "It is a challenge we face in an extremely competitive industry."

So it's a marketing gig. A smokescreen. It is the Krab, the cubic zirconium, the smoke in mirrors. Looking back at how this started, one would have to look to our current 3G coverage. Surely it's as fast as we think it is, right?

Wrong.

The current 3G Speed is running anywhere from 500kbps to 1.3 Mbps. That's right, the fastest your phone will take you will be 1.2 Mbps. So 4G is a smokescreen, 3G is a smokescreen, and who knows what else is as well.

What an effective PR campaign to hold it in for this long.

Training a Horse

My father lives in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, and has for the last 12 years or so. He has always been a handy man and enjoys building.

In the last eight or nine years he has slowly picked up a hobby that now almost engulfs him. He raises horses. First he started with a property, then more property, then a barn and a horse. Then two horses, and now he gives lessons to the neighborhood. He loves it.

With that life experience, I was reading through Seth Godin's blog, and read his article The open road. He talks about some time he spend in India. He was being driven on a trip more than eight hours long. He noted what I saw on my way to work today....people love to pass. In his situation it was, as he put it, "death-defying horror..." so it was much more intense than my five minute commute to school, but the principle was the same. His driver sped up to pass as long as there was someone in front of him. The driver needed that competition to speed up. When on the road by himself, the driver actually slowed down.

How often do we see that? I was a Driver License Examiner for nine years and taught the Defensive driving course. In our course materials it said that 70% of drivers feel that they are better than half of the drivers on the road. He who passes us is a jerk and he who slows us down is an idiot. If everyone is better than half of us, then we have a serious ego problem. It's mathmatically impossible.

Back to the Horses. My father's second horse is a decendant of Seattle Slew, the only undefeated triple crown winner. He read up all about horse racing. What to feed them, how hard to work them, how much rest they need.

Most of what my father told me was lost to memory, but there was one major point that he made that hit home to me. He said that when horses run, they chase. A horse runs faster for longer if it is staring down the horse in front of it. If you want to truly train a horse to go fast, my father said, you have to give it a target to beat, in his case another horse.

Anyway I am going on and on here, but the point is the same as what Seth Godin was pointing out today. It is human nature, indeed it is the nature of life, to see a challenge and beat it. Pass the car, beat the horse, race your brother home from school, see who can get to sleep first. Adversity is everything. Without it we are not race horses, we are placed out to pasture!

PRSA Chair discusses the focus of Public Relations in 2011

At the International Conference in November, The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Chair-elect and CEO Rosanna Fiske discussed her major focus for 2011.

Rosanna Fiske is the Chair-Elect for the PRSA and will be officially taking office in January. She is also the Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator at Florida International University.

When asked about the challenges facing Public Relations in 2011, Dr. Fiske said that it is the blurring of the profession. She said she is focusing on the communications challenges of pulling in all available media to send a clear message to intended publics.

Dr. Fiske was asked what up and coming students and PR professionals could do to help them the most, she immediately smiled and energetically said, "Be Yourself!"

Dr. Fiske said that there were more than three thousand people attending the sessions of the International conference. She said the conference was a big success.

PR listed among the 50 best careers for 2011

U.S. News and World Report listed 'Public relations specialist' as one of the top 50 careers for 2011 yesterday. It cited a strong growth potential and a flexible career path as some of the reasons for their ranking.

The publication is part of its annual 'America's Best' campaign that examines everything from law schools to hospitals.

When Rosanna Fisk, Chair and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) was asked about the ranking in an interview yesterday, she said, "PR is one of the most satisfying careers. We face some of the hottest issues in the world." She went on to say, "On the other end [we have] more fun stuff. Product launches and grand openings. It really provides a great variety of work that touches peoples lives."

The magazine cited the Labor Department's forecast of PR jobs increasing by 24% between 2008 and 2018 as a reason for its ranking, as well as the flexible career paths that PR provides its professionals.

The Labor Department estimates the median salary a Public Relationships Specialists makes is $51,960.

The Twitter Effect, two years later.

On March 5, 2008, Stephen Davies posted a story on his blog called The Twitter Effect. It is a tongue-in-cheek look at what twitter tends to do to the blogging community.

Stephen Davies is a communications consultant in the UK, he works has been a writer for a UK PR publication, Communicate Magazine and has been ranked in the "top one percent most powerful and inspirational UK PR people" by PR PowerBook.

Mr. Davies compares the 2008 blogging community to an older married couple. "They still adore one another but, hey, you can't stay in and watch TV together all of your life. You need to go with the guys or gals to drink and flirt a little," he writes.

Twitter distracted bloggers in 2008 and there was a move from the blogging community. He reassures the reader however, that blogging will be around for a long, long time.

Now in 2010, he was right. Blogging is here and continues to fill its niche in the online world. Twitter is limited to the amount of characters a tweet can contain. This limits people's options to look elsewhere if they have a lot to say or to say it with flair.

The twitter community answers that by returning to blogging. So many tweets are linked to blogs. Similar to how the early telegraph lines helped evolve the inverted pyramid, tweets get the leads, then a link to a blog will fill in the rest of the story.

Twitter and blogging have found a very effective way to operate together cohesively. Amazing how time sorts it all out!

Some Italian News.

Toni Muzi Falconi wrote an article (edited by Judy Gombita) that was posted on www.prconversations.com yesterday that is an interesting snapshot of the progress of public relations as a profession in Italy over the last 15 years.

What he found was amazing. He quotes the study of Emanuele Invernizzi (president of Euprera), done in 1983. He researched public relations professionals at the time and found that 54% of Italian companies had implemented some form of PR, but only 18% had a dedicated department.
In 2008, he presented another paper in 2008 saying that 78% of Italian companies had organizational leadership. This means that in the span of 15 years, the organizational need for PR professionals had risen a whopping 60%.


Why is this so?


Looking at how the media has effected the world in the last 1 1/2 decades shows us at least on of the answers. The media has evolved into a personal relationship with each individual, like it or not. Using social media, news is reported just as much and as fast by fellow citizens than by trained reporters.


For example, when flight 1549 crashed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009, social media was credited for breaking the story first.


News is instant, good and bad. Companies have learned that without the right PR, they have to change their own policies at a cost to their own integrities. Apple was forced to change its own policies regarding satirizing public officials because of bad PR.


It's a mine field out there without public relations training. Businesses are finding that the need for a good PR team is becoming a vital department to fund, just to stay afloat.

...For the new guys.

This is the third installment reviewing Richard Bailey's article on why blogging is surviving the facebook/twitter age. His post, entitled, "Blogging, a surprising revival," on his own blog, PR Studies, goes over three lists of 'fives.' The five reasons for the survival of blogging, the five reasons blogging is good for education, and the five best things student bloggers should do as they learn the craft of blogging.

This post will review the third of the three lists, the top five things that student bloggers should do as they learn the craft of blogging.

According to Richard Bailey, these are the top five things that student bloggers should do:

1. Link to people you know.
2. Comment on the Blogs you read.
3. Think carefully about the statement you want to make with your blog.
4. Find your niche and enjoy what you are doing.
5. Tell others you are blogging.

Ok, I know that I didn't make my usual comments following each of these points as I have done in the first two posts about this article. The reason is that this was the hook for me. I glanced through the article, decided to review it, enjoyed it, then got to this last list and found paydirt if you will.

For someone on my side of the PR community (I wish I could say I was learning the ropes but at this point I am still finding them), this is what I need. I am using these to work this experiment of a PR blog. Just to see how well they will work.

Thank you, Mr. Bailey for writing this article.

Blogging and Education

Richard Bailey reviewed why blogging is surviving the facebook/twitter age and it is worth repeating. His post, entitled, "Blogging, a surprising revival," on his own blog, PR Studies, goes over three lists of 'fives.' The five reasons for the survival of blogging, the five reasons blogging is good for education, and the five best things student bloggers should do as they learn the craft of blogging.

This post will review the second of the three lists, the top five reasons that blogging is good for education.


According to Richard Bailey, these are the top five reasons why blogging is good for education:

1. Open Source Learning. This assignment has opened my eyes to blogging that is for sure. I like being able to delve into online content and come up with my own reactions to post.
   
2. Level Playing Field. I have equal rights to blog. This means that my blog has the same limits as anyone. I can say whatever I want. Blogging opens that window.
   
3. The advantage of Non-Compulsory blogs. This assignment is somewhat non-compulsory with regard to the subject matter posted, however it requires 26 posts. Even still, the freedom to choose my own subjects works wonders with my ego! I am creating something here!
   
4. Gaining Experience for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Welcome to the craft of public relations! As we learn how to introduce our own blogs to the public we learn the art and principles of PR.
   
5. Just because something is unfashionable doesn't make it bad. I find it funny that blogging may be considered 'old fashioned.' It is new and fresh to me. There is an entire world of humanity out there, saved in blogs!

Speaking as a student, blogging is becoming an invaluable educational tool. I am training by doing. That kind of kinetic, synergistic approach to education is invaluable.

Resurgence of Blogging

Richard Bailey reviewed why blogging is surviving the facebook/twitter age and it is worth repeating. His post, entitled, "Blogging, a surprising revival," on his own blog, PR Studies, goes over three lists of 'fives.' The five reasons for the survival of blogging, the five reasons blogging is good for education, and the five best things student bloggers should do as they learn the craft of blogging.

This post will review the first of the three lists, the reasons for the survival of blogging.


According to Richard Bailey, these are the top five reasons for the survival of blogging:

1. Blogging is personal publishing. We, as human beings, have the innate desire to communicate. Blogging allows such a thing.
2. Twitter is actually driving traffic to blogging. People post links from twitter to their blogs and people, well, click on them!
3. Blogging is evolving from personal to professional. Newspapers are often using blogging software.
4. Wordpress is a hit. I knew nothing of Wordpress before reading Mr. Bailey's article. I have looked at it now, and love it! I will definitely be exploring it further in depth.
5. Posterous and Tumblr are making blogging much more versatile. Again, my first look. Wow! Posterous IS huge! Tumblr was down when I pulled up the website. I'll be looking at that one again however.

The only point I would like to add actually incorporates all the five reasons together. Everyone has a different history. Everyone has a unique life experience. Everyone has something to say. As long as there are human beings on the Earth, we all will have a drive to tell our own stories. Blogging satisfies that innate human condition. Blogging will be around forever, in my own humble opinion.

A Two Way Street

I was reading on www.prconversations.com and reviewed an article by Heather Yaxley entitled "Public Relations Remains Focused on Media Relations." I thought her idea was definitely worth repeating. The purpose of the article is to remind the PR community that our goal is not to preach with new technology, rather it is to produce communication with the publics that we associate with.

Ms. Yaxley was quick to say that this isn't realistically feasable, but the ideal should be something to aspire to. The nature of public relations is to effect the public in a manner advantageous to your client. Two way communication would be a perfect relationship for this, however the nature of public relations as it stands today is that we have a message to give. Even with the Facebook/Twitter revolution, the mass of PR communication still must lean toward the PR expert.

I echo the idea. As Gordon B. Hinkley said, survey large fields while cultivating small ones. We should all look to ideal and work toward being able to apply it to today's reality. Work towards pure communication while still working in the context of today's technologies.

I believe this is similar to Golf. Golf is a game you can never beat, but by golly you keep trying!

Idiot-Proof Corporate Blogging

B.L. Ochman posted a guide on her blog www.whatsnext.com on how to create a sucessful corporate blog. It was interesting to me, a relatively inexperienced blogger.

Mr. Ochman gave seven steps to idiot-proof a corporate blog.
1. Think Long Term
2. Create Engaging Content
3. Make the Blog look good
4. Invest in Good Writing
5. Keep the Writing In-house
6. Keep Posts Short
7. Love Your Readers

My own Impressions of this center around steps three and six. Step three (Make the Blog look good) boils down to eye candy. If your blog is visually stimulating, it will keep people's attention. Mr. Ochman makes a good point near the end of his post. No one forces people to read a blog. It is their choice to stick it out to the end of the post. Give them some eye candy to hold their attention to the Blog and not move on.

Step six was also noteable. Ms. Ochman says to keep a post under 300 words. You are not writing a book, and Blogging is designed to be an informal outlet to the world. More than 300 words requires an investment on the reader's part. This is good if your reader is very interested in what you have to say, but the reality is that you will draw more readers for longer if you split that longer post into a few shorter ones.

Close the Umbrella

So far in my study of Public Relations, there is one principle that I have noticed comes up over and over again. I thought it deserved some direct attention. The best way I can understand it is to compare it to closing an umbrella.

Out here in Utah, umbrellas are used year round. The obvious choices would be to use them during the transition seasons (spring and fall) and there are plenty out on the side walks during those months, but we also use them during the winter, to keep the greatest snow on Earth from falling down the back of our shirts. For the purposes of this comparison however I would like to concentrate on how we use umbrellas in the summer months.

Utah heat is dry and scortching. "Safe Sun" is a phrase you hear a lot. It takes just about as long to get my kids prepared to go outside during the summer as the winter, because of sunscreen and cool yet covering clothes. One thing we keep in the old minivan is an umbrella.

Using the umbrella casts a shadow over the area you are walking or sitting (for the many parades that happen in Cache Valley). As you find some shade or return to your car or home, you close the umbrella. The shadow it casts shrinks until only the folded umbrella casts any shade on the pavement.

Similarly, it appears that the craft of Public Relations first focuses on casting the big shadow. It starts with mass media, such as broadcasting or mailers. From there the umbrella starts to close. More direct contact to a more focused public starts to feed stronger feelings toward or against the focus of the campaign. This may include more direct mailing, coupons, face to face visits with community and business leaders, etc. Finally, when the shadow has focused in on just one public, the campaign has weeded through generals to the specifics. They have their following. I also understand that this may focus a group for or against you. Both may be the more common ending.

Anyway, simple mind, simple products. This umbrella theory looks like it should fit. So far in my studies it looks to be solid. I would welcome your feedback.